Book Review: Lock In By John Scalzi

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Book Review: Lock In By John Scalzi

There’s no mistaking what Lock In is, it’s a police procedural. It’s got a couple of twists to the formula but at its core it is unapologetically the sort of detective story that CBS would happily put in their lineup. Procedurals tend get looked down on because they rely so heavily on a certain pattern, but they’re also really popular. Which should tell you something.

More importantly Lock In is a well executed procedural, and the twists are interesting in their own right too.

What’s It All About?

The story is set in the near future after a virus (named Haden’s Syndrome) ravages the world on a scale close to that of the Black Death. The virus doesn’t just kill people though, in some cases it re-writes their brain leaving people conscious but unable to control their own bodies, or “locked in”. To solve the problem of these Hadens, technologies have been developed that allow them to control humanoid robotic bodies (nicknamed Threeps) letting them interact with the rest of society.

Naturally there are tensions in this new society both between normals and Hadens and also amongst Hadens themselves. Our protagonist Chris Shane (a new FBI agent) and partner Leslie Vann find themselves a murder where the prime suspect is an “Integrator” (a person who can let a Haden use their body instead of a Threep) but who claims no memory of the murder. When additional murders occur it becomes clear that something much larger is going on.

Threeps, Hadens, What?

There’s definitely a learning curve with this book as you familiarize yourself with the terminology and the history of “recent” events. Have no fear though because the book starts with a giant, blatant infodump of tedious comprehensiveness!

Why the decision was made to do that I don’t know, as if you can simply be patient for say an additional 5–10 pages you’ll get all the explanations you need included in the narrative. It’s a brilliant concept that we like to call “Show, don’t tell.” Scalzi does it more than competently so the infodump is not only tedious and off putting but completely unnecessary.

The concept of Threeps is particularly interesting to me. It essentially side-steps the whole AI, robotic consciousness issue completely. These are androids with no brain. They’re fancy people carriers basically, allowing a Haden to move around, talk to and touch people.

But at the same time, the nature of Threeps isolates Hadens. Threeps look humanoid, but they don’t look human. You can’t eat or drink and by extension then you can’t taste. It is implied that sex might be possible, but it’s also implied this is a fetish more than anything else. Hadens then are isolate, a society within a society.

In this regard the closest comparison I can think of is deaf people who have their own language and culture. And similarly to deaf people some Hadens don’t want to be “cured” and re-integrated into society. They have their own unique thing going.

The tensions within and without Haden society are well represented and we get characters from pretty much all viewpoints and several who don’t really seem to have a side. There is a gap though in the representation of Hadens. We are told that a large body of Hadens spend most of their time in a virtual world rather than the physical one and we are given some examples of their individual virtual worlds. What we don’t get though is any insight into how the Haden’s who are primarily virtual dwellers interact amongst themselves. There’s just some rather weak excuse about how it’s not possible to describe to people who haven’t experienced it.

Who is Chris Shane?

So the big twist in Lock In is that Scalzi very carefully doesn’t reveal the gender of his protagonist Chris Shane. The name itself is gender neutral and to his considerable credit Scalzi manages to write from Chris’ perspective and keep gender out of it without wrapping himself in linguistic knots.

The effect was perhaps limited for me by the fact that I was listening to the audio book and the version I got was voiced by Wil Wheaton. Combine my tendency to assign white male to any character who isn’t clearly described and I just went through the story seeing Chris Shane as male.

It certainly doesn’t get in the way of the story, though I’m not entirely sure how much it adds to it either. If an absence can be an additive. Chris Shane is very much a physical rather than virtual Haden, but seems almost asexual the way they are portrayed. It’s not just that we don’t see Chris engage in any sort of intimate (or even romantic) act. That in itself is not particularly surprising in a procedural where the focus tends to be on the murders to be solved. It’s that we never got a sense that Chris looked at anyone in a sexual way at all.

It seems to me that might be a little bit of a cheat when it comes to trying to avoid gendering your protagonist. Or perhaps it’s meant to be an indicator of how different the world is for a Haden who has a whole virtual realm to explore? Are normal humans simply not thought of that way?

Enough With The References Already

I don’t know that there are actually a huge number of pop-culture references in the book but the ones that are there stood out a lot for me. Threeps makes sense, but when you have at least two characters who make references to old films only to have other people not recognize the reference so that the character can then explain the reference, it just feels heavy handed.

I get it, Scalzi is an internet geek and internet geeks love their pop-culture references, but it didn’t feel like it belonged in the story.

Did You Like It?

Yes, it’s a short work so there wasn’t time to get bored, but the central mystery kept me curious all the way through and the concept of Hadens Syndrome and the effect it had had on society (primarily via the introduction of robotic Threeps) was fascinating.

Buy, Borrow or Skip

This one is a buy unless you have a burning hatred for all things procedural.